Re: USAGE: [YAEPT] (was Re: "To whom")

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 09:41:36AM -0600, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> [?] isn't phonemic; he just wasn't being careful in his notation.
Where "he" is me.

Actually, I *was* being careful, just not correct. :)  I tend to avoid
the use of brackets for anything more than an isolated phone, because
they scare me.  Their use seems to imply a level of precision I'm not
generally prepared to supply, involving all sorts of nit-pickery, such
as precise POA/vowel location with diacritics to get it just right, plus
indication of details like aspiration, no-audible-release, etc.  even
when subphonemic.  Just thinking about trying to render a typical L1
English utterance of mine in phonetic notation is frankly exhausting.  I
mean, I have no idea exactly where along the bottom of the vowel chart
my "ah" sound is, and I'm half-convinced that aspiration is a case of pesky
furriners trying to gaslight us poor ignorant 'Murkins by making up
inaudible "distinctions" where none really exists.  (The Japanese
probably have similar suspicions regarding [l]/[r\].)

Anyway.  I tend to use /../ for broad phonetic transcription, not just
phonemic.  It's a bad habit I shall attempt to lose.  I should certainly
have used [] for my description of the British pronunciation of |better|
as [bE?@]; in this case I'm actually more confident of the phonetic
transcription.  What's the phonemic status of trailing -r in non-rhotic
English?  Is it considered an underlying phoneme whose phonetic realization
is a modification of the preceding vowel (or none at all, in the case of
schwa), or merely a graphical convention used to indicate in writing which
of two vowel phonemes should be selected?  (At least in those cases
where English spelling has some bearing on pronunciation.)

-Marcos

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